Greentext

Good for you. My experience is that the program was geared towards people that would continue to masters and PhDs.

I had an exam every two weeks, hundreds of pages every week to read and the professors weren't really available for us, and teaching assistant didn't really give a shit.

The labs were mostly just math labs, with really specific applications.

My only real project was the end of program project that lasted a bit short of 2 years. And the professors that were supposed to help us and support us told us that the project would fail for a good part of a year and a half. And when the project was a success and gave exposure to the school, the same professors that gave us shit for almost the entirety of the project took the credit for a successful project.

If you wanted to do hands on engineering, you had to join extra curricular teams.

My opinion on the matter is certainly tainted by my awful experience, but I did a program to become a technician in my field before going to engineering school and it was much more appropriate for my learning style.

Good management should insulate engineers from most of the corporate politics. My manager, for example, knows we get surprises, so they add in extra time to whatever estimate we give, and he tells stakeholders that this is a firm estimate, which they'll inevitably push back on and they'll concede down to something a little higher than our initial estimate (i.e. handle the corporate politics).

How do I become smart? All I do are online courses for tech and such. I have an established career. Good money, house family and shit

Congrats, you are smart.

The challenge you have now is to acknowledge and feel it.

but I want the prestige of at least having a degree

So here's the problem. you want the prestige, not the intelligence. You can get a degree in various ways if you want, and have the time. You can attend a university course part time, or through their online facilities. Choose a topic you've done a lot of online courses for and try for a degree.

But I’m functionally retarded with math.

There's resources online to help with this, maybe the new methods will help you understand math concepts better. Common core, khan academy, and the sponsor of this lemmy post, skillshare

You don't need to be smart. Back in my uni, there were student initiatives to record the questions and answers of previous exams. The Math department itself gave out previous years exams to study from.

The key to remember: exams aren't written my professors, they're written by the postdocs who have better things to do, and so they just rehash the same stuff from the year before.

If you want to get a useless piece of paper that tells you that you are an expert in topic X, then don't learn X, learn to pass the papers for the X exam, and learn X later in your free time if you're still interested in it.